Celephaïs

"Celephaïs"
Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Country	United States
Language	English
Published in	Rainbow
Publication type	Periodical
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Publication date	May, 1922

"Celephaïs" (/ˈsɛləfeɪs/) is a fantasy story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in early November 1920 and first published in the May 1922 issue of the Rainbow.

The title refers to a fictional city that later appears in Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, including his novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926).

Like many of Lovecraft's stories, "Celephaïs" was inspired by a dream, recorded in his commonplace book as "Dream of flying over city."

The story resembles a tale by Lord Dunsany, "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap" in The Book of Wonder, in which the title character becomes more and more engrossed in his imaginary kingdom of Larkar until he begins to neglect business and routine tasks of daily living, and ultimately is placed in a madhouse. The imagery of the horses drifting off the cliff may derive from Ambrose Bierce's "A Horseman in the Sky" (1891).

Celephaïs was created in a dream by Kuranes (which is his name in dreams—his real name is not given) as a child of the English landed gentry. As a man in his forties, alone and dispossessed in contemporary London, he dreams it again and then, seeking it, slowly slips away to the dream-world. Finally knights guide him through medieval England to his ancestral estate, where he spent his boyhood, and then to Celephaïs. He became the king and chief god of the city, though his body washes up by his ancestors' tower, now owned by a parvenu.

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